Guy's Circus Debut

Our friends from Houston, Guy and Debbie are visiting and we went to the circus last night. It is the circus that I wrote about here. A one-ring circus under a tent. Everyone does double, even sometimes triple duty, from acting as ushers to juggling acts.

We didn't get ring-side seats, still we were about 8 feet from the ring. It was all very professionally done with glittery spandex costumes, silly clowns and several excellent acrobats. I had mentioned that we saw three camels, four llamas and two goats and dogs but the only animals that appeared in the circus was a baby camel and six pink poodles. The camel didn't perform but came out with a big bottle and they had the children come down to see the camel up close and to help hold his bottle while he sucked on it. The pink poodles.....well it was the usual dog act.

But the highlight of the evening for us was when one of the clowns came into the audience to choose some men to help him with his act. Guy was one of the four chosen to go out in the ring. He is the one in the white shirt with the beard. The clown first had them do some silly things but then he set them up on stools balancing against each other and then he slipped the stools out from under them. They didn't collapse. So Guy has made his circus debut. We are hoping that he doesn't leave town with the circus but we aren't sure. Now let's talk about photographing at the circus. I took a 70-200mm f/4 lens and the new 50mm f/1.4 lens and a tripod. Right away I found that the tripod wasn't going to work. There wasn't room to set it up and on the tripod the camera wasn't mobile enough to catch the action. I tried the 50mm faster lens but I couldn't get in close enough with it to isolate any one. So decided to go for the blur....lots of blur. Just a little blur makes it look like it isn't a sharp image. I think it would take some practice and trying different f-stops to figure out how to get what I was thinking about but I still had fun and ended up with several colorful "smears."